Second anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery!

The famous subatomic bump: A mass plot from the ATLAS experiment showing the decay of the Higgs boson into four leptons. (Image: ATLAS Experiment/CERN)

It’s been two years since the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN jointly announced the discovery of a new boson consistent with the Higgs particle of the Standard Model. Since then, the Higgs boson has been intensely examined. We’ve measured its spin, its mass, its lifetime, and observed its decay into bosons and fermions. In the next run of the Large Hadron Collider, we hope to learn more about how it interacts with other particles and to make many more precise measurements of its properties. By doing, we hope to extend the limits of our current understanding of the fundamental components of nature, and to seek clues for discovery.

Here are glimpses of ATLAS’ journey since the announcement on 4 July 2012:

Introducing the Higgs to the world: Fabiola Gianotti, who was spokesperson of ATLAS from 2009 to 2012, presenting the experiment’s Higgs result to a hall packed with audience at CERN. (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

Introducing the Higgs to the world: Joe Incandela, then spokesperson of the CMS experiment, presents his experiment’s Higgs result. (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

"We have a discovery": Fabiola Gianotti with CERN’s director general Rolf Heuer and then CMS experiment’s spokesperson Joe Incandela at the press conference following the Higgs seminar. (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN

For the 3000-strong ATLAS: Gianotti and current ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton applaud the collaboration’s work at a celebratory event following the seminar. They are wearing the Higgs t-shirt that was made for the ATLAS collaboration to mark the discovery. (Image: Claudia Marcelloni/ATLAS)

A beautiful event: A cut-out of the ATLAS detector showing the decay of the Higgs boson into two photons (yellow trapezoids). (Image: ATLAS Experiment/CERN)

Nobel mentions: Members of the ATLAS Collaboration cheering the Nobel Academy’s decision to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to theorists François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.” The announcement was screened between physics talks at a conference in Morocco. (Image: Giovanni Darbo/CERN)

The laureates: Theorists François Englert (left) and Peter Higgs show their Nobel Medals after the ceremony on 11 December 2013 in Stockholm, Sweden. (Image: Niklas Elmehed/NOBEL MEDIA AB 2013)

The physics chair: The chair signed by both 2013 physics laureates at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. (Image: Niklas Elmehed/ Nobel Media AB)

It's a fermion! A Higgs boson candidate decaying into two tau leptons, which belong to a group of subatomic particles called fermions. Such decays help confirm the role of the Higgs boson in the Standard Model. (Image: Riccardo Maria Bianchi/CERN)

Tiziano Camporesi (left), spokesperson for the CMS experiment, and Dave Charlton, spokesperson for ATLAS, cutting the Higgs boson cake at ICHEP 2014 in Valencia, Spain, to mark the second anniversary of the particle's discovery. (Image: Steven Goldfarb/ATLAS)